Sunday, 24 October 2010

History corner – Macaroon cakes

Today’s delve into the past comes from the 1949 edition of Lily Gilmour’s “Everyday Cookery”. Lily seems to have taken a rather wide definition of every day cookery because some of the recipes would probably take most of the day, such as the haggis made from scratch. The first ingredient in the list is a sheep’s pluck. For the uninitiated, a pluck is the heart, liver and lights. Lights means lungs, by the way. Second ingredient on the list – a sheep’s stomach bag. Are you salivating yet?

My favourite recipe in the book is for “fried crumbs”. The recipe – and you might want to get a pen to write this down - advises to heat butter in a frying pan, add breadcrumbs and stir over a gentle heat until they turn golden brown. Oh Lily, however do you come up with your ideas?

For all my mocking, this is actually a nice little cook book with lots of useful advice for the housewife…make no mistake, it is intended only for the housewife; the unmarried or male must look elsewhere for recipes. As with many books of the time the writing style is authoritarian and doom laden – for example, rather than telling us that cakes should always go into pre-heated ovens, we are instead told: a cold oven is fatal.I’m assuming Lily means it’s fatal for the cake? Or maybe it’s a threat?

The recipe that caught my eye was for these little macaroon cakes. I have never made tartlets before that use puff, rather than shortcrust, pastry. I used pre-rolled, pre-made butter puff pastry; much as I like making things from scratch my exceptions to the rule are puff and filo pastry. Lily’s recipe for puff pastry (listed elsewhere in the book) suggests that it will go from ingredients to finished pastry in less than 30 minutes…I’m rather dubious about that!

The jam that sits at the bottom of the tartlet is a most welcome addition:

If you use pre-made pastry (hangs head in shame) these are a quick bake. They are also extremely tasty; personally though, I would prefer shortcrust pastry. Lily doesn’t list jam in the ingredients list but mentions it in the method so I have added it to my ingredients list below. I have also doubled the ingredients as I thought those given were meagre, they actually would have made 12 tartlets.

The macaroon element of this recipe is old-school!Forget the fancy little sandwiched Laduree things, these are the crunchy and chewy almond delights!The batter, on going into the oven, starts to get holes in it – rather like a crumpet.At first I thought the recipe had gone wrong but then it dawned on me that these were the hearty macaroons us Brits grew up on!Here’s a close up:

Ingredients

These quantities will make 24 tartlets – you will think that you are not going to have enough of the macaroon mix....but you will!

7 comments:

You certainly didn't begin by whetting my appetite, but luckily things began to improve as I read on. think I agree with you though that shortcrust would be better. I did make puff pastry from scratch once - it took an age - definitely not 30 mins - and I vowed never to bother again!

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